evga precision x crashing drivers after underclock

My roommate did find some lumps of what looked like compressed dust bunnies that must have gotten worked into the fan when I blew it out but never noticed. So it looks like the card just couldn't vent it's heat and died. Looks like the crashes were caused by the card overheating and it eventually melted itself down. With my permission, my roommate opened up the casing on my GTX 980 Ti, and found that some of the components inside had fused together. I swapped it out with an older card which, while not as good, at least isn't bad. At one point, it stopped outputting entirely. The problem kept getting more frequent as time went on, despite my efforts to mitigate it. : To follow up, I guess this was the beginning of the end for my card. I'd be willing to replace the GPU, but unfortunately new current GPUs of comparable performance are hard to come by these days. I'm wondering if there are some Precision X1 settings that would increase reliability, or if there's some kind of degenerative condition on the hardware itself. It happens in multiple games and reducing the display settings to take load off the GPU doesn't seem to make a difference as far as I can tell. This only happens when it seems to be under some kind of load, but it's not apparent what exactly is causing the problem. Nothing about my setup substantially changed in that time, it's just that when running a lot of games the display driver will hang and reset, and if the game can't handle that it will crash to desktop, if not hard lock my machine altogether. It's worked for me well and faithfully until a few months ago when DirectX started randomly crashing on me. I'm running a GeForce GTX 980 Ti that I got new back in about 2015 if my memory serves. So I've got an issue with my GPU and I'm looking to do a sanity check and see if anyone else has seen something similar, or has some advice about how to deal with it.

Evga precision x crashing drivers after underclock